Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Fantastical Launches New Premium Subscription for Families
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Semi unrelated, but this is one place Google shines more than Apple. When they split their core apps out of the OS and put them on the Play Store, it allowed them to be a lot more flexible and deliver new features sooner. Doing that on the App Store would all but shut down this poor decision non-sense by Flexibits.
I mean it’s still the best calendar app out there.
Unless there’s others out there on a non subscription model with as complete a feature set that I’m unaware of?
Did ask earlier in the thread, but no one came back with anything.
It’s definitely targeted at a specific audience now, but if it’s integral to your workflow, it’s not THAT unreasonably priced.
(FWIW, for me personally, its utility has increased massively since lockdown)
This. Fantastical is going after the prosumer market. The 3rd party integration is great for me, plus the ability to propose new times, and lots of other features. It's a great alternative to Outlook. I tried to use Outlook but I live and work in China and Outlook sucks with location awareness. Fantastical has no problem, and that is the big reason I use Fantastical over Outlook - location awareness is horrible for Microsoft Outlook in China. Outlook doesn't even recognize Chinese address, with fantastical I can type Chinese or Pinyin and it works fine.
For the typical person, Fantastical is a waste of money. I get it, why pay $5/Month for a program to display a calendar when I could just go to Google and see it myself! Because, some people need/want a calendar app to do more than just display dates and times of events.
Oh, not to mention the excellent time zone support and ability to set preferred time zones. This makes it great when trying to organize meetings in multiple time zones around the world.
Lots of features that prosumers might need.
The cost is ridiculous. I get the full Microsoft Office suite for that.
Exactly.
Dont get me wrong, I’d sooner it wasn’t a subscription service, but just for the ability to add Zoom/Meet calls without having to fire up the gmail website (our company’s email is through GSuite) it’s worth it, since I set up at least 6 a day most days. The rest is icing
[automerge]1597176282[/automerge]
As with most things, the cost is ridiculous if it’s not worth it to you.
Lifetime subscription is sustainable as long as it isn't what the majority of users are subscribed to. Pricing it as high as infuse did (equal to prepaying for 5 years) allows them to keep it as a purchase option for the minority of users making it sustainable while capturing the users who loathe subscriptions at all cost.
If you move from Free or one-time purchase to subscription base you should at least have the decency to keep it free for existing/early adopter customers. Why? Because they paid for the status quo. They made the app great. They financed you, often supplied feedback, probably even helped in getting the app compatible with certain devices/APIs/...
Not sustainable my...
Yes, if your development team (or management for that matter) is oversized, inefficient or driving around in BMW 7 series then it might be difficult to sustain.
This whole subscription model idea has to be coming to a crashing end soon surely. It is simply unaffordable to pay these fees for every single thing you do all day. Looks like every man and his dog has looked at the subscription model with $$$ in his eyes and is trying it on, but I suspect the numbers will come in, and the result will be a lot of lost customers and no extra dollars, and a lot of these will go back to reasonable fixed prices. That's assuming the whole experiment doesn't send the broke due to broken customer relationships.
A lot of people are wasting no time in complaining about how Fantastical is charging too much. The same could be said about any app fee. Not everyone is going to find the same need and value in the same apps. Just because some of you think the price is absurd, that doesn’t negate the valued use for someone else.
I paid the $40 to use Fantastical because it works for me.
I paid the $40 to use Fantastical because it works for me.
It's too bad. They make great software. I see a lot of SW devs making this same mistake. They don't understand price tiers/ pricing psychology. If Fantastical came in with a lower yearly price point like for example, BackBlaze, they'd make up for that with volume. If they wanted $1.49-$1.99 per month for Fantastical Premium, or $15 - $30 if paid yearly, I suspect they'd get a lot of takers. But $4.99/mo is too much for what you get.
You can’t claim they made a mistake without knowing how well they’re doing now.
For all you know they could have doubled their revenue over this.
I paid for a subscription for starters, and I know I’m not the only one. And yes I’ll renew and yes I may take them up on this new offer.
Yet how many of the naysayers here will pay five or six dollars for a latte at Starbucks?
I divorced Fantastical. Without asking, they deleted my perfectly fine Fantastical 2 (which was bought and paid for), and replaced it with nagware version 3 that asked me to subscribe at every turn. And they wanted money every month to return to most of what I had before. And for what?!? Reading my Office365 calendar? No way! I dumped them and never looked back. I'm not paying any calendar APP a subscription. Ever. Talk about GREED! Bring back a flat price and maybe i'll reconsider. But probably not because I don't trust them any more.
Same with a lot of tech podcasts. I don't get the love for this app at all. I purchased it on my iPhone on sale a while back and tried it for a couple weeks and then deleted it.
100% screw these developers. Converting to a subscription model and handicapping a previous version I paid for? Zero compelling reasons to convert to the subscription model, I hope they burn.
It might not always be possible of course, but it's great that Flexibits did just that. F2 customers got most of F2's features in F3 without subscription, and if the one missing full-screen Day View is a problem F2 continues to be available (on iOS at least - I don't use Fantastical on Mac). Still works just as great as when we paid for it.
You'll notice I was only talking about the iOS version. Looks like Flexibits treated their iOS customers better than their Mac ones.
Same reason anyone spends money to use any paid app? Because it either does additional/different things to what free apps do, or it does the same things, but better.
I’d imagine I’m not the only person who’d prefer it if you didn’t wish away a key daily driver of their workflow 👍🏼
I ended up trying it out (paid for a year upfront too). It has a nice interface and I like being able to create events by typing them in directly on my iPad with the Smart Keyboard.
This happened earlier this year when my school implemented home-based learning and I needed a good calendar app to keep track of a ton of events flying around and the default calendar app just wasn’t keeping up. Zoom integration was nice as well.
However, one irritating thing is that the Siri watch face now shows two calendar entries for each event (one from the stock calendar app, one from fantastical), and the watch widget feels quite cramped. I am also running iOS 14 on my iPad Pro and the updated calendar app fixes a number of issues that drove me to fantastical in the first place.
So I may eventually go back to the calendar app, though my subscription is still good till next year.
